


Liars and Killers

by SvengoolieCat



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: 004 is the homicidal sibling Q never wanted but got anyway, 00Q RBB 2017-2018, Banter, Bond regrets things, Canon Typical Violence, M/M, Mole hunts, Murder Most Foul, SPECTRE Fix-It, Slow Burn, Snark, art prompt, regret is unprofessional, traitors in our midst, whodunit
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-22
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-04-26 11:05:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 13,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14400846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SvengoolieCat/pseuds/SvengoolieCat
Summary: Prompt from IngaWeiss's gorgeous RBB art, "A Bloodstained Bullet," found here: http://00qreversebang.tumblr.com/post/170363215449/ingaweiss-my-art-prompt-for-00q-rbb-wasAfter his retirement at the end of Spectre, Bond returns to Q for even more help. Q isn't happy about it, but relents when Bond gives him a bloody bullet that was used to murder Madeleine Swann and frame Bond for the crime. The bullet turns out to be a Q Branch prototype, and Q's suddenly got a few problems on his hands, including: a mole in Q Branch, a fugitive and retired 00 hiding out at his house and insisting on feeding him up, and Q doing his best to solve Swann's murder--and possibly his own.Story is complete but for an epilogue, and chapters will be posted regularly as they are edited.





	1. A Bloodstained Bullet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ingarisa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ingarisa/gifts).



> Title taken from Swann's line in SPECTRE: "tous sont des menteurs et des tueurs, des tueurs et des menteurs," or, "all of them are liars and killers, killers and liars."
> 
> Thank you again to IngaWeiss for such an awesome piece of art to work with.

 

 

“Oh, hell no,” Q said.

The lights were on in his kitchen when he arrived home. Very few people knew where he lived, fewer knew how to get inside without dying, and only one would have the temerity to brazenly make himself at home while Q was at work. Bond, James bloody Bond, had never been great at boundaries. Otherwise he probably wouldn’t have asked Q to risk his neck and career quite so many times.

Q let himself in the front door, reset the alarm, and took a moment to gather his thoughts and composure. It took longer than he would have liked, but it had been a long day. And Bond always had a way of putting Q on his back foot, especially if he wanted something.

The smell of pasta and tomato sauce eventually lured Q out of his foyer and into the kitchen.

Bond’s back was to Q as the former agent stirred a red sauce heating in a saucepan, but the line of tension bunching up those impressive muscles under the tight t-shirt meant that he knew Q was there. One of the cats, Ada, sat at Bond’s feet and gazed adoringly up at him. Figured. Q always thought that she’d throw him over for Bond, and the cat had moped inconsolably for months after Bond stopped coming around to crash on Q’s sofa after hard missions.

“You have nothing in your kitchen to eat,” Bond said. “Except some green pasta and a jar of sauce a couple months out of date, so we’re living dangerously tonight.”

“Been a while since I’ve done groceries,” Q said. He dropped his briefcase in an empty kitchen chair and sat down in another. What a beast of a day, and he couldn’t really see it improving anytime soon. “And the green pasta is fine. It’s made with spinach. Look at me, eating vegetables.”

“There was dust on the box,” Bond said. “And I was too afraid to check the expiration date.”

He still hadn’t turned around, nor had the tension eased under the thin t-shirt. Q resisted the urge to drum his fingers on the kitchen table.

They’d been friends, once, hadn’t they? Or, Q supposed, whatever passed for friendship in their fucked-up world of spies and shadows. But it had been a while—nearly a year—since Bond had left MI6 with the Aston Martin and Dr. Swann, never to return. Drove off into the sunset, off to happy domestic, retired bliss.

Why the hell was he back?

“Have you come to kill me, then?” Q asked. “Because if you are, kindly get it over with quickly. My back is killing me, and one of my minions set me on fire today with a prototype pocket flare, which ruined my favorite cardigan. All the fires that I’ve had to put out because of Stevens, and it’s one of my more level-headed minions who tries to light me up like a fucking effigy to Guy Fawkes.”

This got Bond to turn around. “Oh no. Not the mustard brown cardigan. How horrible.”

“Shut up,” Q said. He took off the mangled cardigan in question, then tugged on his skinny tie until it loosened.

Bond dumped the cooked green pasta in the sauce, stirred a bit and then divided the whole thing between two plates. The entire thing looked highly unappetizing, but Bond dropped into the chair opposite of Q and practically began inhaling it.

“I didn’t poison anything,” Bond said. “If you die, it’s because of your own dodgy ingredients.”

Q picked up his fork and watched Bond over the rim of his glasses.

He never seen Bond look so rough. Even after difficult missions, he’d had a debonair look to him. Casual dress to the man meant that he vaguely resembled a golf course edition of _GQ_. The Bond that sat in front of him now seemed almost unrecognizable. He wore faded jeans and a t-shirt, and there was a battered leather jacket on Q’s coatrack he’d never seen before. Bond had several days’ worth of bristly grey scruff on his face, his hair was longer than Q had ever seen it, and the lines around his eyes were more like gouged craters.

Q ate half of his dinner and shoved his plate over. Bond shrugged and finished it off.

“Okay,” Q said. “You’re not here to kill me, you’re alone, and you look like someone beat you with the hobo stick. What gives?”

“How do you know I’m alone?”

“Dr. Swann is hardly so discourteous as to break into someone’s house to eat dodgy pasta.”

Bond grunted, conceding. “I need to lay low for a bit,” he said.

“What the hell for?” Q leaned back in his chair. Alan meeped and hopped up into his lap, helping him stare down the former agent. “What’s going on?”

Bond reached into his back pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, tossed it lightly down in front of Q. He unwrapped it, swore, and almost dropped the thing.

“Christ, Bond. Warning is nice.”

The handkerchief had been carefully wrapped around a bullet. Blood, a fragment of bone, and bits of viscera stained the cloth and there was a long blond hair caught in a groove.

Q’s blood turned to ice and he shooed Alan down.

That solved one mystery, then.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Bond’s face looked like craggy granite. “I thought I could escape him,” Bond said. “I should have killed him there on that bridge.”

Q frowned. “Blofeld has been in solitary confinement since his capture. Any interaction he does have with people is carefully monitored. His rooms are tossed regularly, and everyone he encounters is searched before and after. Every twitch, every conversation, every time he so much as thinks of sneezing, we know all about it. Even meetings with his lawyers. I ensured it,” he finished, darkly.

The ex-agent looked as still as a cobra considering a strike. “Then you’ve missed something,” he said.

Q crossed his arms. “Possible, but unlikely. He made things rather personal, and none of us sleep half so well anymore. The entire security service was overhauled after you left. For months, I spent eighteen hours a day digging Nine Eyes out of our systems and organization. I’m _still_ doing it.”

Q didn’t say that the workload had gotten him involuntarily carted off to the rehab clinic in the countryside twice, or that there had been three separate assassination attempts. M halfheartedly scolded him about overwork, and Tanner escorted him out to the clinic personally, but they understood. They were doing the same thing as he was, and he rather thought that was one of two things that had saved Q’s job. The other thing was he had made a point of scaring the shit out of everyone. Within weeks of him going on the offensive and starting to clear MI6, MI5, and government of Nine Eyes and SPECTRE agents, there had been a mass exodus as the cockroaches fled for cover. Anyone who didn’t want to kill Q wanted to keep him really fucking happy lest he decided to turn on them.

“It has to be him,” Bond insisted. “He likes to play with his food before he eats it.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning they bloody well think I did it, Q,” Bond said. His voice had gone silky, mission-smooth. The kind of voice that meant pain and death were on the way. “I’m a fugitive of Interpol now.”

“ _And you came here_?”

“You’ve got more defenses than Mallory does, Moneypenny would probably shoot me again, and who would think I’d run to my Quartermaster, anyway?”

“Former Quartermaster. And everyone who ever met you,” Q said, dryly. “When you want a general favor, you go charm it out of Moneypenny. When you want someone to pull your sorry arse out of the fire, you come and smolder at me like the male version of Marilyn Monroe until you get your way. Always have.”

Bond’s gobsmacked expression was one Q would treasure until his dying day. Finally, Bond cleared his throat and croaked, “You’ve never let me down.”

“Sweet talk will get you nowhere.”

“Just, do this one last thing for me,” Bond said. He leaned forward, earnest now. He pointed at the bloody bullet. “Tell me who that belongs to, and I’ll go and handle it and you’ll never have to deal with me again.”

Q looked at the bullet. Thought of the woman who had caught it. _What a fucking waste_ , he thought. Even if he’d sometimes been bitter (during those quiet, 3am witching hours when Q was more a villain than a benevolent overlord of the nerd herd) about the way she’d managed to bewitch Bond away from them, she didn’t deserve the shit hand life had dealt her. She should have been left alone to shrink heads in a comfy clinic somewhere in peace instead of dragged into it all.

“All right,” he said, quietly. “I’ll look into it. Might take a while.”

“Thank you, Q.”

Q folded the handkerchief back up, slipped it into a spare evidence bag, and put it away in his briefcase.

“You know where the spare room is,” Q said, standing. “And a shower and shave wouldn’t go amiss.”

He heard Bond chuckle as Q left the kitchen. “I missed you, too, Q.”

“Shut up, Bond.”

 

Q_007_Q

Q doesn’t take the Tube anymore. Not since the incident with the guy and the knife. He requisitioned a car, had it outfitted with extra armor and gadgets, and now he drives whenever he goes places. It’s nice, he can listen to whatever he likes on the radio, but it feels a bit lonely sometimes. He never realized how much he’d come to rely on strangers on the Tube for a sense of normalcy and undemanding company.

But for once, driving into work with his briefcase taking the passenger seat beside him didn’t feel lonely. Even though he’d left Bond at home, sleeping like the dead on his sofa with a cat draped over him, the man’s presence seemed to hover over Q. Or maybe it was Swann’s. Q didn’t want to think too hard about it.

He flagged down R and handed her the evidence bag with the bullet. His second-in-command looked at the bag and then uncertainly at Q. He didn’t feel like explaining, so he just said: “Expedite this. My eyes only.”

“Yes, boss,” she said. She took the bag and tucked it into a pocket. She’d gotten used to Q playing things close to his chest as of late, and Q was in no mood to suddenly be forthcoming. A little bit of paranoia went a long way, and in his domain, it was just unsettling enough to keep minions and agents alike on their toes and wary.

008’s mission in Somalia was tits up by ten in the morning, so Q put the bullet and the former double-oh out of his mind for the better part of the day.

Science takes time, so Q didn’t expect to get any immediate results back. Neither, apparently, did Bond, who seemed to have settled himself in Q’s guest bedroom after doing the groceries (only Bond would do groceries while being a wanted fugitive). And the laundry. Q, who’d made the effort to leave work at a reasonable time for once, stood in the middle of his living room and stared at the man, bemused. Bond ignored him and continued folding socks, the evening news on telly.

“There’s a beef roast with potatoes and carrots in the oven,” Bond said serenely. “Should be done around six.”

Q wandered to his bathroom to take a shower and was confronted with fluffy clean towels, still warm from the dryer. He stared at that for a moment, too. “Who are you and what have you done with 007?” he whispered to no one. What had Dr. Swann done to reprogram the bad boy of MI6 into a domestic god? Or had he always been like this? What the hell was going on?

 


	2. A Trojan Lunch

 

Q’s and Bond’s domestic situation went on for a week. Bond did whatever former agents-turned-wanted fugitives did during the day (Q suspected a lot of Netflix) and Q worked at MI6 and kept the existence of his new flatmate a secret. Secret-ish. Naturally, everyone noticed something was up with the agency’s favorite little cyber-viper and speculated on the cause.

“Leftovers again, Q?” R said. It was Day 6 of the Bond Invasion and she peered over Q’s shoulder at the Tupperware of butter chicken, rice, and green beans he was heating up in the breakroom. “I didn’t know you cooked. Or had time to cook. Or ate, really. Half of us think you’re some sort of tea-vampire. Are those vegetables?”

“Begone, R. Just because you’re dating doesn’t mean we all are.”

She gasped theatrically. “Ooh is that how it is? Is someone trying to feed you up?”

Q backpedaled. “Any progress on the bullet?”

“Good science can’t be rushed, Q.”

“Try.”

“You’re no fun anymore,” she said. But she was smiling as she said it, and it took a moment for Q to realize he was smiling back.

R tracked him down late in the afternoon the next day. Q looked up from his soldering iron and took in the crossed arms and the frown. She held a nondescript file folder out to him, waiting patiently until he put down the iron and took off the protective gear.

Q flicked open the folder.

“I wasn’t aware that we had been field-testing these already,” R said. She examined her nails. The TARDIS-blue polish was chipped because of nervous picking. One nail was almost bare.

Q looked at the lab results, the bullet, and then at R. “We aren’t supposed to, they aren’t ready.”

“Clearly,” R said. “The composition and the markings are all consistent with a prototype batch of bullets we cast last month. But the bullet didn’t break down like it was supposed to.”

The bullet program was not a successful one. They’d had more failures than successes—and Q was of a mind to shelve it. The bullets either didn’t disintegrate at all, or they started too early. Entire batches had had to be destroyed because they’d been ruined by improper storage, which didn’t bode well for the field. It was impossible for agents to keep their ammunition in climate-controlled environments when they’re in steamy jungles chasing down smugglers, or in Russia in December, or in any number of hostile climates. The bullet was supposed to help manage the cleanup of wet operations—it’s much harder to investigate a murder without a bullet—but so far, the prototypes had been more trouble than they were worth.

“Did you check the inventory?”

R snorted. “Do I look green to you? Of course, I checked. The bullets were all fired a couple weeks ago in a three-round series of tests. None of them should have been left over.”

“Were the bullet casings retrieved?”

“Yes, sir. And sent through recycling, since we were only interested in the bullets, not the casings.”

Q stared at the bullet in consternation. “Well, shit.”

“There’s more, sir. I ran a DNA sample on the bullet. I got a match pretty quickly but judging by the look on your face you already know who it is.”

“Don’t say anything, to anyone,” Q said. He tucked the bullet and the reports into an inner pocket of his coat. He needed to go upstairs.

R’s hand shot out and closed around his elbow. “Q, there’s something I need to tell you. I promised I wouldn’t, but I think it’s more important you know. It’s about Bond. They say he killed her. That she was a SPECTRE agent, or maybe he was. Her body was found ten days ago in the south of France.”

“And?”

“And you turn up with this evidence that you shouldn’t even have? And it turns out to be one of our bullets?” R’s grip tightened painfully. “Whatever game you’re playing, be careful. Promise me you’ll be careful. I don’t really want a promotion.”

Q covered her hand with his and gave a reassuring squeeze. “I’m always careful. Who swore you to secrecy?”

R looked guilty. “Tanner. He said you’d worry.”

Q went back to his office and engaged privacy settings. The office was like a tiny fortress—soundproofed, equipped with a small signal jammer, and a few other tricks he kept quiet. Q had set up the room to be utilitarian—the bookshelves neat and tidy, a large safe off in the corner, the desk clear with only a lamp and a desktop computer, and he had more than one weapon hidden within reach. Overall, he’d organized the place to be hard for an assassin to conceal themselves, and there weren’t many places to plant a bug that Q wouldn’t find it quickly. It grated on Q’s cluttered artist soul, but after the incident with the rogue SPECTRE double agent, he decided that continued living was preferable to creative chaos.

Q dropped into his cushy office chair, put his feet up on the desk, and steepled his fingers. It was a pose the minions referred to as the Supervillain Brood, but it did help him to center his thoughts. And, hell, half the time these days he _was_ a supervillain, just ostensibly on the side of the angels.

He had some immediate problems to consider.

First. Clearly, there was another mole in Q-branch. Someone smart enough to survive Q’s rounds of Inquisitions, and someone with access to top secret research projects. Someone who clearly expected the bullet to work properly and dissolve, and not be defective. Or, at least, they expected the bullet wouldn’t be dug out of the victim’s skull with a pen knife. Because who the hell did that? Bond, apparently.

Second. Why was M-branch aware of Swann’s murder and concealing it and Bond’s role from Q? Didn’t want to worry him, indeed. Last he checked, he wasn’t a fainting Victorian heroine.

Third. How was he supposed to tell Bond that the bad guy he wants to kill might be closer than he thinks? Bond had been patient so far, but that patience had an expiration date and then there would be hell to pay. ( _You’ve never let me down_ , he’d said.)

Q dug his fingers into his eyes. He needed to plot. This was a delicate balance to these sorts of things, and he didn’t really need Bond behaving like his normal blunt-instrument self. He needed a scalpel, at least for now.

Q logged into his computer and started pulling personnel records and reports from R&D from the past six months. Hollywood would have you believe that mole-hunting was dramatic and quick. Finding moles in real life was a matter of drudge-work that could take weeks or months: painstaking attention to detail, double checking inconsistencies, office gossip, mis-filed paperwork, and a “trust no one” attitude that, frankly, was exhausting and irritating.

But it was all work that would have to be done on the side. He was still the Quartermaster, which meant he had missions to oversee and projects to review. Hunting would have to wait for afterhours. And he needed to talk to M as well. Figure out what M-branch knows and isn’t telling and remind them why them being secretive little shits just made more work for him, not less. A solid week of red lights might be enough to express his ire to M in a perfectly passive-aggressive fashion.

He’d have to think of a way to keep Bond from Hulk-smashing in, too. Which would be hard since Bond would get antsy soon and start asking questions and Q was a shit liar. And Bond would know Q was hiding something if he started behaving differently. Perhaps he should kill two birds with one stone and invite Moneypenny to lunch. She’d tell him to stop being a paranoid jackass and might be able to tell him why M-branch was being cagey.

A knock at the door disturbed his musing. He saved his files, closed out of his work, and checked the CCTV. _Speak of the devil and she shall appear_ , he thought. Moneypenny stood outside his office, with a bag of takeout that she waved invitingly at the camera.

He lifted the security protocols and let her in.

The smell of General Tso’s chicken with pork fried rice wafted to his nose and made his stomach growl.

“You’re a goddess,” he said, and meant it.

She dug the Styrofoam containers out of the bag, one with a _Q_ drawn in sharpie on the lid, the other with an _E_ , while Q fished a new package of double-stuffed Oreos out of his snack drawer.

“You have the best snacks,” Moneypenny said happily, helping herself to an Oreo before opening her own lunch.

“Boffin’s prerogative,” Q said.

“Hmm,” she said. “I’d say to eat your veggies, but a little bird tells me that someone has been feeding you up lately, veg included.”

Q opened his container to find chicken, fried rice, and steamed broccoli. He wrinkled his nose at the last, but food was food and one didn’t turn it down, especially since she’d been so kind as to remember to bring a container of sweet-and-sour sauce to pour over the rice. “Clearly, the little bird is underworked if she has time to twitter,” Q said, darkly.

“Oh, lighten up Q, I’m glad you’ve found someone to look after your shifty skinny arse. Since you don’t do anything but work, I am compelled to ask: Anyone I know?”

“This is bribery-lunch,” Q said. He looked at his food. “A trojan lunch, that ushers in armies of questions and speculations.”

“Oh, good. Melodrama. Been a while since I’ve seen that,” Moneypenny said.

Q dumped the sweet-and-sour sauce on his rice and didn’t deign to answer.

“So, what brings you down to my domain, Moneypenny?” Q asked. “Other than my sparkling company?”

“I was wondering how Bond is doing,” she said.

Q choked on his rice. “How would I know how he’s doing?”

“He’s camped out at yours, isn’t he?”

“Haven’t the foggiest what you’re talking about.”

“You’re a shit liar, Q.”

“Thanks.”

She continued picking at her food. “Come on. It wasn’t hard to guess. R said you’re happier, more secretive than usual, that someone’s feeding you, and I might have snuck a glance at the report on the bullet that you’re so very protective over. Never mind that whenever Bond’s in trouble, he prefers to hide behind your skirts the best.”

Q deflated and set down his fork. He wasn’t hungry anymore, because his stomach churned with nerves. The room closed in a bit—Bond could very well get him arrested for treason this time.

Moneypenny kept eating. Former agents. Nothing put them off their feed. Q queasily remembered green pasta and expired sauce.

“That’s exactly what I told him,” he said, relenting.

Moneypenny waved her fork in his general direction. “I know. I went to see him after I found out. Damn near shot me on your front stoop.”

Q’s skin crawled and went clammy. He felt sweat break out on his hairline. “Sounds like him. What did you tell him?” he said. He reached for his cardigan or a lab coat, it was bloody freezing in here.

“Mostly, I just yelled and told him he’s an asshat. Leaves us to clean up his mess, and then shows up stinking of another one before we’ve managed the first. And he drags it to your doorstep, which is typical but infuriating.” She glanced up. “Are you okay?”

Q’s vision blurred and swam. “No,” he said, panicking even as he felt the world slow down too much to be normal. _I’ve been poisoned_ , some rational part of his brain concluded. _Well, shit, that’s a new one_.

He was distantly aware of someone shouting his name. Moneypenny’s face swam in and out of focus.

“Poison,” he tried to say, but nothing came out but a croak.

“What? Q. Q!” she said. Or perhaps, shouted. Q wasn’t sure.

Hands were on his shoulders, easing him down to the ground. His body seized, all the muscles contracting and releasing, so fast he couldn’t catch his breath.

He didn’t have to try to hyperventilate long before the blackness came for him.


	3. Collateral Damage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're switching gears a bit in this one, setting up for the second half. Next update is currently scheduled for Sunday. 
> 
> Thanks for all the comments!

Q didn’t come home.

Bond refused to play the nervous housewife, but it was past midnight, and Q wasn’t home. He knew that the Quartermaster sometimes worked late, crazy hours and sometimes didn’t leave the office for days. It came with the territory when dealing with a globalized world that didn’t sleep and a small army of spies in every time zone. But Q had tried, whether consciously or not, to come home at a reasonable hour and every day. Bond fed him up—what else could he do when multiple law enforcement agencies were baying for his blood, except plan a menu and cook it—and the boffin shuffled off to bed almost directly afterward and slept like the dead, only to rise at 5am the next morning to do it all over again.

The Q that Bond had been cohabitating with was not the Q that Bond remembered, who laughed awkwardly at his own jokes. This one was exhausted and paranoid, with dark shadows under his eyes, thin enough that Bond could count ribs whenever the boffin did his semi-conscious zombie shuffle from the shower to his bedroom, and the once soft green eyes were now flinty enough to rival any Scotland Yard detective. He even dressed better, in subdued suits and understated ties with conservative patterns and socks of white, black, or brown. Bond almost wished for some of the more garish articles of clothing that Q used to wear, but a search of Q’s closet revealed that they’d all been replaced with fashionable, high quality bespoke suits for meetings, and higher end casual clothing for the days Q spent in the labs or TSS.

It was a stupid thing, especially since Bond used to give him a hard time over his bright, eyesore sartorial choices, but now faced with the alternative, Bond mourned it a bit. He missed the Q who he had left, the Q who had lived in his imagination, the image sometimes so strong that it was all Bond could do to keep from picking up the phone. But the way Bond had left things, well, he’d mucked it up well and good and so he always stopped short of pressing the Call button. He wondered if he should have been braver. Sent the collection of postcards he’d amassed during his travels, always with the boffin in the back of his mind.

The closet wasn’t the only place where things had changed. The defenses on the house probably rivaled the Queen’s, except for the manpower (although Bond was half-convinced that the couple who lived across the street were bodyguards), and he’d looked at Q’s car. Armored like a tank and just as weaponized. Getting anything specific out of the boffin was like pulling teeth, but Q had mentioned a few safety incidents in the not-so-distant past that led to increased precautions.

From Q, that could have meant anything.

Alan, the demure tabby, sat at Bond’s feet as the man checked his burner phone for the umpteenth time. Bond looked down, meeting somber yellow eyes. Alan meowed.

“I’m sure this happens normally,” Bond said. Alan _mrrrr_ ed doubtfully and washed a paw, biting at his claws.

“I see your point,” Bond said. “If he knew he’d be gone for a long time, he’d have said. Or taken you with him like he used to. Something’s off.” And in his former line of work, deviations from routines never boded well.

There was an itch between his shoulder blades that kept him from just going to bed. Instead, he packed his rucksack—it’s not like he had much to his name, except a change of clothes, his razor, and a gun—and figured he’d wait it out in one of his bolt holes he still had in London. Q would get in touch with him when the coast cleared. Assuming, of course that he wasn’t being a paranoid bastard, but he hadn’t survived so long by letting himself get overly complacent. Although, staying with Q had been nice: quiet, undemanding, and a tempting illusion of normalcy that Bond found hard to leave.

He fed the cats and changed their water on the way out. Who knew when Q would be back, and at least they would have a couple days of food. It seemed the one thing about Q that had remained the same was the way he doted on his two fluffy feline companions. Every night he brushed them in front of the telly, murmured sweet nothings into pointy little ears about how good and pretty his darling kittens were, while they purred like tiny motors and made biscuits with happy paws. Bond wasn’t jealous. Absolutely not.

The night was as dark as it ever got in the suburbs, but Bond crept out through the back garden.

“ _James_.”

Bond dropped into a defensive stance, gun up and unwavering. The whisper came again: “ _James_!”

“Moneypenny?”

“Oh, good. It’s just you lurking in the bushes.”

Moneypenny had wedged herself into the shadows by the gate in Q’s tall privacy fence. “I hoped you were still here.”

“That’s nice. Why are _you_ here? It’s a school night.”

“Haha, age jokes. So funny. It’s Q.”

Bond came closer then, just enough to make out her features. Her eyes were huge, and she looked more frazzled than he’d ever seen her. She wore the same clothes he’d last seen her in when she’d stalked in like an angry Valkyrie and threatened to castrate him if he stepped out of line.

Whatever shriveled raisin that passed as the remnant of Bond’s heart dropped like a pebble into his gut. He didn’t want to know why she was there. It looked too much like she was coming to notify him of another death, one more body in his wake. This time, not a lover or a mother-figure, but probably the truest friend he had left, an almost-lover, perhaps. Someone who used to look at Bond with soft green eyes but never demanded or asked for anything more. And Bond had looked back, taking advantage perhaps, but too conscious of the way everyone important to him ended up horribly dead to risk that leap.

He shook off the horror. Regrets are unprofessional and unhelpful, or so he’d been told. “What happened to him?” Bond asked.

“He’s in hospital,” she said. “He was poisoned.”

Bond went still, crushing hope before it had a chance to take hold. “Will he live?”

Moneypenny swallowed. Bond had the horrifying realization that she was close to tears, which was just all kinds of wrong. Women like her didn’t cry unless the world was ending, and if Moneypenny cried he didn’t know what to do, except maybe to go kill whatever displeased her. Although, knowing her, she probably already did kill whatever displeased her, but perhaps he should offer anyway. Or help her with the body.

“If he makes it through the night, he’s got a fighting chance. They almost lost him twice, and they’re worried about water in his lungs,” she said. “It was…awful. Bond. I was used as a cat’s paw. It was in the food I brought him. Someone laced his sweet and sour sauce, because—”

“Because he puts it on everything, yes.”

“There’s more,” Moneypenny said. She reached into her messenger satchel and pulled out an evidence bag and a folded piece of paper. “I don’t know if he told you, but the results came back on the bullet you gave him. This was hidden in an inner pocket of his coat. I took it before the paramedics got to him.”

Bond read the report. “Ballistics test matches bullets currently in development in R&D?”

Moneypenny nodded.

“Who else knows about this?”

“You, me, M, Tanner, and R, that I know about. He found out this morning—well, yesterday, now—and might have started poking around, asking questions, looking at logs, there’s no telling.”

[ _“The entire security service was overhauled after you left. For months I spent eighteen hours a day digging Nine Eyes out of our systems and organization. I’m still doing it,” Q said. He just looked tired and nothing like the uppity little shit who created computer protocols only a half dozen people in the world could use._ ]

“There’s a mole, somewhere in Q Branch,” Bond said.

Moneypenny palmed a mess of springy dark hair out of her face and sighed gustily. “There’s a mole,” she agreed. “And our best bloodhound is in hospital getting his stomach pumped while he knocks on heaven’s door.”

Bond silently tucked the report with the bullet into his pocket.

“It’s time I came in from the cold, then,” he said.

“No, no it really isn’t.” Moneypenny said. “Whoever poisoned Q knows that he knows something. And right now, with you in the wind, it will keep them on their toes because they don’t know what shadow you’re lurking in.”

“But this exonerates me,” Bond said. “M will see that. There’s no way I could have access to this kind of ammunition since I’ve been out of the country and out of contact all this time.”

“Oh, Bond. Do you think that’s the only thing they’re saying about you?” Moneypenny asked. “That you’re possibly a murderer is the least of your worries. They’re saying that you’re SPECTRE. That you’ve been helping your foster brother all along, which is why you didn’t kill him even though you had the opportunity.”

Bond stared mutinously at her. “M can’t possibly believe that. _You_ can’t.”

“You’re more likely to get the benefit of the doubt than most,” she admitted. “It’s probably why you aren’t currently in custody. But if you come in now, you give up every advantage you have, and you’ll be in a high security prison before the sun rises. That’s if you’re not dead from an ‘accidental’ bullet.”

She had a point. He read well enough between the lines that he was being given a length of rope that he’d either use to climb out of the miserable pit he’d put himself in or he’d use it to hang himself with stupid.

“I’ll need files,” he said. “And I’ll need to see him once he’s conscious.”

Moneypenny looked unimpressed. “You want me to be your mole, again?”

“Worked out the first time,” Bond said.

“That’s debatable,” she said. She paused, lips pursed and eyes considering. “James, the only reason I’m here at all is because whatever your sins, I don’t think you’d harm Q. Knowingly. But I’ve never known someone to leave so much collateral damage in their wake.”

“Which, according to Blofeld, was all his doing. Even now, somehow.”

Her hand was on the gate, opening it a crack. “Make yourself scarce for the time being, Bond. And pray to whatever gods or devils you believe in that Q wakes up and isn’t a vegetable.”

 

 


	4. Always Been a Matter of Trust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we find out what happened to Q, my version of 004 returns (introduced in my other Spectre fix-it), and Q is still dead set against being a fainting damsel in distress.

 

Q dreamed.

_Someone ran a warm hand through his hair and murmured in his ear. A pleasant voice, deep and rumbling and comfortingly familiar in the exhausted dark of Q’s half-dreaming brain. A whiff of woodsy aftershave cutting through the acrid hospital smell. Q knew this person, trusted him even though he knew better, and acutely felt the loss when he withdrew_.

Q woke and felt like he’d been hit by a lorry that had stopped, backed up over him, and run him over a second time. Lights were too bright, and it seemed like every muscle in his body was cramping like he’d undergone the worst full-body exercise known to man. He knew he hated the gym for a legitimate reason.

He heard the crinkle of book pages being turned by the person keeping him company at his bedside. Who was it?

He blinked, but the world remained blurry. Why was it blurry?

Before he could panic, the person sitting beside him slipped his glasses over his ears. The figure came into sharp focus as 004. He’d never been so happy to see Scarlett Papava, with her vintage red lipstick and silver screen siren aesthetic. With her favorite little black funeral dress, she looked like a predatory black widow in a Carrie Underwood song.

“Welcome back, handsome,” she said, putting the book aside. “You had us worried for a bit.”

Q had vague recollections of hands on him, shouting, and movement he couldn’t keep up with.

 “You’re damn lucky,” 004 said. She pressed the button for the doctors, and Q felt his eyes falling closed again. He was too tired to even get worked up over being intubated.

_It must have been bad_ , he thought drowsily as Scarlett reassuringly squeezed his hand. Then he was out.

The second time Q woke up and was cognizant, the breathing tube was gone, and his throat felt dry and sore. His chest didn’t feel all that great either—rather like he’d had an elephant sitting on him.

“I’m alive,” he croaked triumphantly at 004, who was still there, but wearing a different print dress. A bright pink and yellow plaid pattern, a nice change from the somber black dress he’d seen last time.

“Thanks more to your own bloody-mindedness, according to the staff here, who have all been sworn to secrecy, by the way. As far as the world is concerned, you’re dead. The funeral was yesterday, and it was lovely. You’d have hated it. There was religion. And R cried buckets and _buckets_.” Scarlett flashed a sharp, mildly psychopathic smile that would scare a normal person, but Q had dealt with 00s too long to be bothered. She poured a cup of lukewarm water and stuck a straw in it for him. It had the hard, metallic taste Q had learned to associate with hospitals, but it was still amazing.

“It was a fentanyl overdose,” 004 continued, smoothing the starched A-line of her skirt. “Someone put it in your food. Moneypenny was questioned, and every inch of her office, car, and apartment searched and ultimately came up clear, but by then, another case of fentanyl poisoning came in from the restaurant where she ordered the food. They died.”

Q listened, and just focused on breathing. Fentanyl. He was lucky indeed. Brief and minor exposure to that drug was often enough to kill someone, and when cut into cocaine or any other number of street drugs, it made overdosing almost a certainty. Never mind the illicit drug use aspect of it, the substance was technically classified as a chemical weapon and kept under lock and key because it could be made into an aerosol.

“Have the inventory in R&D checked,” Q whispered. “Long shot, but I have a theory.”

004’s dark eyes trained on Q’s face. She waited, patient. It was one of the reasons she was his favorite double-oh. She listened, brought her equipment back most of the time, and had a disturbing but helpful ability to follow his line of reasoning without needing explicit explanations. Once, he’d tried to get M to sign off on a cloning experiment program.

[ _“But just think of the possibilities of an army of Scarletts!” Q said. He gestured expansively at the pub around them. “I could rule the world. An army of Scarletts to enforce and an army of Moneypennys to organize and both of them to intimidate with their superior sense of style.”_

_M looked torn between fascination, horror, and amusement._

_“I could do it,” Q said, feeling the confidence of three whiskey sours on the rocks and half a basket of chips and salsa._

_“No, Q, you are not allowed to take over the world with clones. Especially not 004 or Moneypenny clones. Dear God, the horror.” Was M laughing at him? Tanner was doing that constipated look with his face again, so probably._

_Q deflated. “Fine,” he said. “I have other plans. But this one would be_ so _efficient.”_ ]

Q winced and started sitting up. She helped him, fluffing his pillows. “Do you want me to bring your laptop?” she asked. “Or a tablet?”

Another reason Q liked her. She didn’t coddle him or treat him like glass. She treated him like another double-oh when there was a job to be done. Stick a plaster on whatever’s bleeding, duct tape some shit together, and get on with it.

“Please,” he croaked.

“001 will relieve me in a couple of hours,” Scarlett said. “Until this is sorted, you’ll have one of us haunting you at all times. Suzy is still wreaking havoc in the Maldives, but she should be back by the end of the week. I’ll bring you some tech when I relieve Ed tomorrow morning.”

There was a time to argue and a time to pick your battles. Q nodded. As much as he hated to admit it, having an off-duty double-oh guarding him was oddly comforting. And if she promised to bring him his things tomorrow, she’d do it. It did him no good to argue for sooner. Besides, he was tired, and all the stubbornness in the world wouldn’t keep him awake for much longer.

“Thank you,” he said.

004 brightened, a smile crinkling around her eyes. “Look at us, switching things up! This time I’m the one bringing you equipment. Shall I include a lecture about being responsible with it and that if you aren’t, all you’ll get is a flip phone and a water gun next time?”

Q’s voice might have been used up after the short conversation, so he tried out his middle fingers. They worked just fine.

004 cackled merrily. “Better get some more sleep, Q. Tomorrow morning, you’ll have work to do.”

Scarlett was as good as her word. She brought him his favorite laptop and his phone. He didn’t ask her how she got them, and she didn’t offer any explanations. He suspected high-level collusion, because no one pestered him about working from his hospital bed. It was, after all, his body that let him down, not his brain. Medical care had been swift enough that he hadn’t suffocated or dropped any IQ points from oxygen deprivation.

After a brief debate with himself, he told 004 everything. At least if someone succeeded in trying to kill him, at least there was one more person out there he trusted to take up the hunt. And he was still officially dead to all but maybe five people in the world. He even told her about Bond.

“You trust him?” Scarlett asked, neutrally.

“I…of course,” Q said. He frowned. She wasn’t looking at him but was rather busy sharpening and balancing her favorite set of throwing knives.

“Did you ask him if he did it?”

“…No.” No, he really hadn’t, come to think of it.

He’d just assumed that Bond was clean and telling the truth without question. Because it was _Bond_ , and if Q couldn’t trust him then what was the point of anything? But for a man who’d spent the better part of a year barely trusting anyone, such acceptance was weird. Weirder still that it felt natural. Like Bond had never left, just been on a long-term undercover assignment. He’d fit right into Q’s life and home like he’d always been there and even though Q knew it wouldn’t last— _knew_ that Bond would leave him behind again—he liked having him around. Liked having him back in whatever limited capacity Bond would allow. Q was momentarily pissed at himself for being pathetic, and the machines he was hooked up to beeped angrily back at him.

Now Scarlett’s lips twitched as though she’d been listening to his thoughts. She drew the whetting stone down the blade with a metallic ting. “Okay.”

“What?”

“You trust him. You’ve always trusted him, and that grumpy bastard has always trusted you. If you say he’s in the clear, that he’s not Swann’s murderer, and that he’s not a SPECTRE agent, I’ll go with it. Innocent until proven guilty, all that rot. Besides. This is _Bond_. If he went traitor, I’m going to just retire and go be a hedge witch out in the woods somewhere, because there’d be no point in anything.”

“Ah,” he said. He looked back at his laptop because it was easier than looking at her knowing smirk. And although his computer was getting on in years, and some of the stickers were peeling off, he still loved it and it had never let him down when he needed it most. It steadied him enough to look back up. “Thank you.”

“Mm-hm.”

He wondered where Bond was, if anyone had told him Q had survived. Or had he lurked in the distance at Q’s funeral, mourning yet another friend lost to Bond’s truly shitty personal luck?

Q fiddled with his phone for a moment. The temptation to reach out had him typing out a short message and deleting it, over and over. Knowing Bond, he’d probably ditched his burner and was in the wind.

He put down the phone. He was not a pining Victorian heroine, trapped in an asylum, waiting for rescue. He refused to act the part of one. He was the Quartermaster of MI6, and if he could not move heaven, he’d raise hell and unleash it on the deserving.

He picked up his phone and dialed another number. “I need more space and privacy,” he told M, on a secure line. “Can a trip to the country be arranged? I’d also like to keep Scarlett, so we need to create a plausible undercover assignment that allows her to go dark.”

“Anything else?” M asked wryly.

“Yes. Hardcopy files and logs from R&D from the last six months, or a year. Scarlett can help me comb through them and look for any inconsistencies between hard and electronic records.”

“Done,” M said. “Shall I send you more manpower?”

Q paused. “No. Everyone thinks I’m dead, and I’d like to keep it that way. Why give up such an advantage?” he asked.

 


	5. Dogs of War

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Bond does some actual detective work, 004 turns up with an offer he can't refuse, and Q claws his way out of the grave. Metaphorically, speaking.

 

Bond hated the bloody cemetery. He sat on Q’s grassy plot, back pressed against the cold black headstone engraved with a name Bond didn’t recognize and a platitude that would have made Q scoff. Olivia Mansfield was planted a few rows over and although she was dead, Bond could swear he felt her hovering at his shoulder, bitchy and impatient with him as ever.

She’d tell him to get on with the job.

Bond would, if he knew how. He’d been tracking leads for well over a week. The restaurant itself had been a dead end. The surveillance cameras in the business were for show because they weren’t even hooked up to anything. Talking to the employees was only slightly illuminating. The victim had made his dire finances known and had mentioned something about suddenly finding a couple hundred pounds to cover his bills.

Bond was willing to bet that he had been paid that amount to spike the sweet and sour sauce. Appalling. Everyone in the industry knew that a decent assassination contract started at ten grand and went up from there. A couple hundred pounds to bump off the Quartermaster of MI-6 was just plain insulting. Moneypenny had texted that the poison was a fentanyl overdose. The nature of fentanyl meant that unprotected exposure could mean a death sentence. Bond was willing to consider the possibility that the patsy might have been lied to about what it was—told it was cocaine, maybe. Might have even saved a little bit of the white powder to snort instead of using it all.

He’d broken into the restaurant worker/victim’s apartment and tossed it. The cops and landlord would have a field day when they found the place meticulously dissected. Nothing out of the ordinary, except a small bag of weed hidden in a kitchen pot (did the man think he was being clever?) and a stash of coke in a hole in the mattress. Bond had eyed the baggie of white powder before rubbing some on his gums to verify it. Bond could almost hear Q’s outraged voice lecturing him about sticking random things in his mouth. When Bond identified it for coke—and not the top shelf kind—and didn’t die, he ignored it and looked for information on the victim’s dealer.

The flat was a tiny, dingy two room affair full of dirty dishes in the sink, laundry cluttering the floor of the bathroom, and a pile of unopened bills crowned with an eviction warning. Bond cringed a bit at the mess and unwashed smell. This was one of the line cooks who was entrusted with food? He made a note to check the restaurant’s history with health and safety.

The neighbors themselves didn’t tell Bond anything he hadn’t already gleaned for himself, and none of them remembered anyone new coming to the flat.

“He was an idiot,” declared the woman who lived across the hall. She smelled like stale cigarette smoke and the smudged kohl and eyeshadow around her eyes told him she’d slept in her makeup. Bond thought she’d be pretty in low lighting and after a few drinks, and he figured her for a stripper or hooker at one of the local clubs. She glared balefully at Bond and shook cigarette loose from the pack, fished a lighter out of her bra, and lit up. “Pissed money soon as he got it. Had the nerve to ask me how much I cost. He only did that once,” she muttered darkly.

She exhaled, and her expression dared Bond to follow up on that comment. “So, he bought girls?” he asked instead.

She huffed. “Even we got standards ‘round here. Too much beer and blow, not enough money? That don’t pay bills, even in this shithole.”

“You know who he bought from?”

“Same guy everyone else around here does, and that’s all I’m sayin’,” she said.

“Thank you,” Bond said. He pasted on an innocuous Scotland Yard smile, and flipped his small notebook closed.

“Whatever.” She slammed the door in his face.

“Charming,” he muttered.

Well, at least he knew one thing: he wasn’t dealing with a mastermind. This was classic espionage, 101. Surveil your target, identify habits. Find someone peripherally involved in those habits to serve as a patsy, exploit their weaknesses or invent them (usually cash-flow problems), and convince the patsy to do something—in this case, murder as a favor. Remove the patsy or organize it so they remove themselves. Neat. Tidy. Textbook. Bond used to be able to do it in his sleep.

Finding the dealer wasn’t too hard. Neither was dispatching two would-be street toughs and beating some information out of the dealer.

“I didn’t sell fentanyl to nobody,” the dealer sobbed. “I don’t touch that shit.” His face was a mess of blood and bruises, and Bond was unmoved.

“Why not?”

“Bad for business. Customers who OD and die don’t buy. Please. I didn’t, I swear. _I swear_.”

Bond considered the slobbering mess at his feet. “Okay,” he said.

Bond lit a handful of trick birthday candles he’d found at a joke shop and bundled together like mini-dynamite sticks. They were the kind of candles that spark and are impossible to blow out. Bond grinned at the dealer over his shoulder and tossed the candle-bundles onto the table where the dealer and his men had been parceling weed before he interrupted. Granted, it was a little meanspirited, but Bond wasn’t exactly feeling charitable. He rather felt like his old self again, pissing people off and making enemies for the fun of it. The candles weren’t exactly grenades, but the dealer’s anguished shout and desperate attempts to put out the burning pot and candles were nearly as satisfying.

So, at loose ends, he found himself at the cemetery and sitting on Q’s grassy grave with a bottle of cheap whiskey wrapped in a brown paper bag, like a hobo. Not moping. Double-ohs didn’t mope. Not even former ones. If he started, he’d never stop. He could almost feel Mansfield’s ghost trying to kick him in the kidneys while howling about unprofessional regrets. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the stone. He’d give just about anything to have Q’s even tones in his ear again, telling him what to do and where to go, and be careful with that, 007, it’s a prototype.

Bond had done the stupid thing in breaking into the Intensive Care Ward to find Q’s hospital room before Bond disappeared into the seething mass of London again. The boffin looked like he was already dead, hooked up to more beeping machines than Bond cared to think about, with his chart recording the times Q had coded. He had machines breathing for him, monitoring blood pressure, filtering his blood of the toxin. Bond had seen healthier, stronger people die under less duress and better prognoses than what Q was struggling to fight through. Q’s skin had been cold to the touch, even with the shock blankets and hot water bottle. Bond re-tucked the blankets securely around the boffin.

Bond had known then that he was saying goodbye. It was more than he usually got when he lost someone, but it hadn’t seemed real until they buried him on one of London’s few sunny days.

For all the shit they’d been through together, Bond never really thought that he’d outlive the boffin. Q was a constant: the voice in Bond’s ear, the sometime-Jiminy Cricket, the awkward joke, and the midnight ping of a texted cat pic during the harder missions. Bond felt the rotgut whiskey burn down his throat like penance.

The crunch of footsteps on grass broke Bond’s not-moping. He cracked an eye open.

“Hello James,” 004 said, sunnily.

Bond opened the other eye. Scarlett Papava was easily one of the deadliest double-ohs, even if she looked like the most innocuous. She smiled at him with blood-red lips but her dark brown eyes were cold and hard. They’d always been amicable, two predators who respected each other even if they had different methods of getting the job done.

Today she’d set aside her vintage look for working attire: black pants suit, sensible shoes, dark hair gathered into a long ponytail. Bond sighed. First, Q gives up his garish work clothes, and then 004 turns up looking less like a 1940s film star and more like an American FBI or Secret Service agent. Clearly, Bond had taken all the fun with him when he left.

He held out the bottle of whiskey. Something in her expression became marginally warmer, and she accepted, taking a swig and then coughing delicately.

“Surely you can afford better than this,” she said. “What is it, stewed gym socks fermented in a barrel of cat piss?”

“I don’t have to share it,” he said, mulishly.

“Too late, possession is nine-tenths.” She took another swig and then kicked him in the ribs to move him over so she could perch daintily on the headstone. Bond inched over, grudgingly.

“I will tackle you,” he said. “I do not care if you are a lady or not.”

She giggled. “Please, it would brighten both our days to scrap over shitty whiskey in the middle of cemetery like teenage rapscallions.”

Bond made a face. “Who the fuck uses the word ‘rapscallion’ these days?”

She bopped him on the head. “Shush. Or I shall tell you that you look like a grizzled old troll who lives under bridges and eats tourists. And then I might mention that this disheveled, unshaven, hobo look you’ve got going here is not a good one, darling.”

“Thank god you have better manners than that.”

“Damn straight,” she said, finally giving him the whiskey bottle again. They sat in silence, listening to the wind in the grass and the distant sounds of London, and passing the bottle back and forth. Double-ohs didn’t often let themselves mourn their losses, but Bond and 004 had been Q’s favorite agents, so it felt right to sit there, passing a bottle of bottom-shelf spirits between them.

“I didn’t kill her. Madeleine, I mean,” Bond said.

“Wouldn’t care if you had,” 004 said.

“I didn’t kill him,” Bond said. Then, quieter: “Although, I might have gotten him killed.”

004 sighed through her nose. “Regret is unprofessional,” she said.

“I’m not a professional anymore,” he said.

“Q made a lot of enemies. It wasn’t the first assassination attempt. Certainly not the first attempt this year, even.”

“I should turn myself in.”

004 laughed. “Oh James, why so maudlin? It’s not like we don’t know where to find you. You’re not a great mystery, you know. In times of trouble, you always come back to England. And in acute trouble, you go to Q. It was a matter of waiting you out and seeing what you were up to.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that?”

“Because it’s true. Neither one of you was any good at being subtle about the bedroom eyes and flirting over the comm. lines and exploding gadget innuendos. It was all very cloying. Everyone hoped you’d have some filthy, trashy car sex in the back of the Aston and get it out of your systems. I had 20 quid on it. Alas.”

Bond made a face like a fish, like he wanted to say something and couldn’t quite manage it. She whacked him upside the head again, this time with an envelope. “Regardless. This isn’t a social call. Orders from on high, for old time’s sake. Find this man and be prepared to drag him back home, alive.”

Bond cleared his throat and took the envelope. Documents, a new burner phone, some cash, and a photograph. “Who is he?”

“All in good time. He’s in France. Keep an eye on him for a bit and wait for further orders, and then we’ll discuss how to make this nasty little international murder mystery go away. Misbehave, we’ll arrest you and throw you in the darkest pit we can dig.” She patted him on the shoulder. “And you’ll never know what really happened to Q. _Ciao_ , darling. We’ll be in touch.”

004 swung her legs over the other side of the gravestone, and strolled away, hands in her pockets. She pulled out her phone, and the voice on the other end picked up after two rings.

“Did he take it?”

004 didn’t turn to look over her shoulder. “He will.”

Behind her, she heard the unmistakable sound of shattering glass and she smiled.

 

Q_007_Q

Being dead was so boring, Q thought. He was making steady progress in his recovery and was the envy of the rehab clinic because his daily walks and turns about the gardens were taken on 004’s arm. She teased him mercilessly about him being her arm candy.

“No offense darling, you haven’t my preferred parts,” he said with a regal sniff, sending the agent into peels of delighted laughter.

But for a man who’d knocked on death’s door, he was doing well. Time spent away from the stress of Q-Branch, time in the sun, being force-fed up with nutritional (if entirely soulless) food, and regular exercise were doing him wonders. The work helped, too. He combed through records and used M-Branch as his cat’s paw in the investigation back in London.

He felt like he held different pieces of rope in his hands. Different people, different motivations, a tug here or a tug there.

“I have the who and the how,” Q told 004. “Not quite the why, yet.”

They were sitting outside by a pond, underneath a wooden sign that said, “Do Not Feed The Ducks.” They’d packed a healthy picnic to take with them, and Q was taking a truly vicious delight in dissecting his fancy whole grain wheat sandwich and feeding the cucumbers and arugula lettuce to the ducks, all of whom were happy to be complicit in his rebellions. Then he started carving the apple slices and grapes into tiny pieces with 004’s spare knife and feeding those to the ducks, too. _No crisps_ , the nutritionists told him. _Fruit is a much healthier alternative to crisps and biscuits_. Screw that. Life was too short.

“You’re very calm, all things considered,” she observed.

“The world is a very small place to hide when I’m angry,” Q said. “And I am _spectacularly_ angry.” He grinned at her with all teeth and saw the expression mirrored back at him.

004’s phone rang. She answered, and then held it out for him. “Tanner.”

Q listened to the other man speak for a couple moments, hummed agreeably, and then hung up. He handed the phone back to 004. “Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war,” he said. “Let’s go.”

She bounced to her feet and offered him a hand up. “Woof woof.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Cry 'havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war," (Act 3, Scene 1, Line 273) is a line from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. I'm sure I'll be able to write a fic someday that doesn't include a Shakespeare or Marlowe reference, but today is not that day.   
> (Srsly tho, I'm a trained medievalist, not an early modernist, I don't know why I am the way I am.)


	6. The Mechanics of Espionage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a fight, a whodunit reveal, and Bond has lots of constipated feelings about things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the delay, everyone. I got wrapped up in other writing projects and only just realized I hadn't posted this chapter yet. One more to go to settle things.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has left kudos and comments, they are always appreciated!

 

 

Bond crept up the stairs to the second-floor apartment. It was a nondescript apartment in a nondescript part of town, which practically screamed subterfuge. It hadn’t taken Bond long at all to figure out that he was being sent after one of their own, and that the rogue agent had something to do with Q’s murder and possibly Madeleine’s. It was enough to make Bond’s cold blood boil, but he had been told to bring the man in alive. Considering his situation, he wasn’t in any position to take creative license. He’d keep this bastard alive, if only for the pleasure of extracting every piece of knowledge out of his head. And possibly, all his teeth and a couple fingers, for fun.

The door was already cracked open. In Bond’s former line of work, that wasn’t a good sign. He clicked the safety off his gun, wishing that he’d been issued a palm-coded Walther like he used to have in the field. He slowly pushed the door open a bit wider, keeping his ears open for any sound of breathing or movement. It wouldn’t be the first time he got jumped in a situation like this.

Bond took his time, letting his eyes adjust and listening for any hint of what awaited him. A quick look up assured him that there wasn’t a booby trap waiting for him above the door.

He had a second’s worth of notice before a man rose from behind the sofa. Bullets chipped into the doorframe by Bond’s head, but he was already ducking for cover inside as the man turned and ran for it.

For a blinding moment, Bond was beside himself with rage and the next thing he knew he was using the sofa as a springboard and diving after his target. Bond’s weight hit the rogue agent in the middle of his back and both skidded across the floor, twisting and flailing. Bond stayed on top, managing to get a couple blows in before he was flipped over with a textbook judo throw. His opponent was younger, fitter, and if Bond had the energy of rage on his side, the other man had desperation.

Enough desperation that he broke the unwritten rule of male combat and drove a knee into Bond’s nuts.

Rage or no rage, and regardless of whether they were a stubborn macho man or rage ‘roider, for all those individuals in possession of dangly bits, a solid blow to them is temporarily crippling. Bond knew better than most, perhaps, considering his experience with Le Chiffre. But he was still unprepared, and the pain was like being hit in the nose, but further south and worse. Far worse. He focused on not passing out and not puking his guts up.

If Bond was pissed before, he was _incandescent_ now as he dry-heaved. The rogue agent scrambled up and tried to run for it again, but Bond managed to get a grip on an ankle and yanked with every bit of adrenaline-rage induced strength he possessed. He’d be damned if he was going to chase this man through the streets of Dijon.

There was a sickening crack as a head met a wall and this time when the guy went down, he stayed down. Bond panted and halfway sat up, allowing himself a moment to curl up into a ball of pained misery. He really was too fucking old for this. There was a reason the mandatory 00 retirement age for survivors of the job was 45. Bond was pushing up against that age and he felt every bit of it.

When he stopped gasping for air like a landed fish, he checked the guy’s pulse and looked at his face to double-check that yes, this arsehole is the one he was looking for. Bond didn’t have any cuffs on him now, but he had found Q’s emergency go-kit in the boot of the car Bond had sort-of stolen (was it stolen when the owner was dead?). Bond remembered seeing handcuffs nestled between the thermal blanket and first aid kit. (Why Q of all people would have cuffs in his car raised more questions than it answered.) Grabbing his unconscious prize by the ankles, Bond dragged him downstairs before he could come around and start putting up a fight again.

Bond had parked as close to the apartment as he could. Q’s car, a truly gorgeous tricked out cherry red Dodge Challenger, was hardly inconspicuous so he didn’t want to linger any longer than necessary. It wasn’t his Aston, but Bond loved the way the big, armored muscle car growled and smoothly took over the highway. If his Aston had Old World class and charm, the Challenger had a pissy New World attitude and had it in spades. The impression solidified when Bond turned on the radio and his ears were immediately assaulted by Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” The car was like a side of Q that Bond had rarely seen under all that buttoned up professionalism but was always delighted when it came out to play: arrogant, rebellious, and snarky as shit.

He popped the trunk, stuffed the now-cuffed and unconscious man inside—it was a tight squeeze, but he made it work with a little forced contortion—and slammed the door down. He limped around to the driver’s side and got in, taking a moment to catch his breath from his exertions and lean his forehead against the steering wheel.

They said they wanted him alive. They didn’t say they needed him in good condition.

Bond started the car and started on the 8-hour drive back to London.

 

Q_007_Q

Maybe it was Bond’s influence, maybe it was Q’s own villainous flare for the grandiose, but he wanted his return to the land of the living—and his own domain—to be splashy. The threads of conspiracy he held in his hand were drawing tighter as he pulled them into play.

Which is why, when his quarry came down to the car park, he was waiting for her. Leaning against her car, feet crossed at the ankles, arms folded, and furious, he smiled toothily at R.

“Didn’t want a promotion, hm?” he said. “And yet, here we are.”

She stopped dead, face bleaching of all color. “Q?”

He waggled his fingers in a wave and then folded his arms again. “We need to talk, R,” he said. He pitched his voice in the light, even tones that he’d picked up from listening to Bond for years.

He saw the look of blind panic in her eyes and she whirled to run. Q didn’t move. His recovery had been good, but not so good that he was ready, able, or willing to play the hero. It’s not like he had to, anyway. He’d brought back-up.

R bumped right into 004. There was nothing of Scarlett’s winsome humor about the agent now. Her eyes were shark-like: blank, cold, and unfeeling. 001 ghosted up to 004 from another angle, while M and Tanner came out of their own respective shadows.

Threads, drawing closer until they were a net.

“I have the who, and the how,” Q said. “I know it was you who supplied the assassin with the bullets. After all, who would miss a couple bullets when we would be testing hundreds of them? Especially since they’re designed to break down 24 hours after use? You were mostly right. I had to go back over the inventory, recheck all the data entries, even the photographic evidence. But the batch of bullets that you mentioned we tested a couple months ago now, all of them were used and documented. They worked fine. All were accounted for, thanks to one minion’s truly overzealous love of paperwork. But then another batch was cast the following week. Those bullets were defective—they broke too easily and scattered like shotgun pellets, so I ordered them destroyed and recast. Except they weren’t all destroyed, were they? The metallurgy of my bullet matches that batch.”

R remained silent. Tears poured down her face.

“You took some and gave them to the assassin with orders to kill Madeleine Swann.”

“No,” she said. “No, you’ve got it wrong, I didn’t do anything.”

Q shrugged. “I didn’t want to think so, either, but here we are.”

A red Challenger growled around the corner. “It took me a long time to realize you were even tangentially involved,” Q continued, “However, your own partner is not nearly so detail oriented. We searched his apartment and found trace amounts of fentanyl. CCTV across the street places him at the same restaurant Moneypenny and I frequent, and places him there several times. The staff knew him. He got chummy with one of the line cooks, allegedly the one who poisoned me and then died himself a matter of hours later. He was there that afternoon before I was poisoned. Hello, 007.”

The car screeched to an abrupt halt and Bond tumbled out of the driver’s side, white-faced. He didn’t look like he was breathing or like he dared hope. “Q?”

“Quite.” Q said. “I assume you have your package?”

Bond opened the boot and hauled his captive out. Bond threw him at Q’s feet and stared at the boffin, preternaturally still, betrayal written across his craggy features. “You’re a manipulative bastard,” Bond told him. “Didn’t think you had it in you.”

A tiny frown-line appeared between Q’s brows. “Thank you for that input,” Q said. He turned his attention to the captive. “Agent Whitmore, how kind of you to join us.”

Whitmore looked worse for wear. One eye was puffy and black and there was dried blood under his nose and matting his hair. He squirmed a bit on the pavement. Clearly, 8 hours trapped in a cramped car boot, feeling every single pothole Bond saw fit to drive over, was not a fun experience. Q looked at his beautiful car, the mud and the scratches left from the potholes and gave Bond such a pointed, familiar evil look that if the former 00 hadn’t been stewing in a myriad of constipated and overly complex emotions he’d probably have kissed him then and there.

“This is the deal on the table,” M said. “Whoever talks first and tells us everything, including others involved with this scheme, gets a charge of treason with a sentence of twenty years in prison.”

Q smiled without his eyes. “I’ve kindly offered to drop the attempted murder charges against my own person. The unlucky one gets door number two: a mandatory life sentence with charges of treason, attempted murder, and one count of second degree manslaughter.” He looked at R. “I hope you take the first option,” he said.

“I didn’t know, I swear I didn’t.” R said. She started toward Q, only to be shoved to her knees on the pavement beside Whitmore. “I didn’t know until we got the results of the bullet and the DNA test back. He expressed an interest in the bullets, and I didn’t see the harm in a preliminary field test, particularly since the batch before had worked brilliantly. I didn’t know they were defective until later.”

“Andrea, shut up,” Whitmore hissed.

“I didn’t know he was going to kill Swann, I swear. But then he did, and everything snowballed. And then you died of poison and I knew. I knew it was him.”

“Why didn’t you come to us?” Q asked.

“I’d have lost everything, you idiot. It was a stupid, honest mistake, and you would have tossed me out for it.” She glared up at Q, eyes red and puffy. She wiped her running nose. “You’ve made your zero-tolerance for this shit very clear. How the hell could I tell you I’d been dating a SPECTRE agent without noticing? I was working on fixing it.”

“What?” Whitmore asked. “What do you mean, _fixing it_?”

“Fixing you,” she growled. “You think you’re the only one who can plan a murder? At least I wouldn’t have gotten caught on fucking CCTV!”

“You bitch!” He lunged for her, but still half numb from being cuffed and tied, he just flopped over and waggled about on the floor like an enraged fish.

“All right, this is just getting embarrassing.” Bond reached down and grabbed Whitmore by the scruff of the neck and hauled him upright. “Where did you get your orders to kill Madeleine and Q?”

Whitmore spat on his shoe.

Bond picked one of Whitmore’s fingers and applied pressure with a meanspirited jujitsu hold. “I spent the entire ride over, daydreaming about ripping your nails and teeth out with pliers, and then chopping your fingers off joint by joint and maybe your dick with wire cutters. Please keep being uncooperative, and I’ll happily get to work.”

“I didn’t get orders,” Whitmore said. “I thought I’d show some initiative. Prove myself worthy and move up.”

“Somehow, I don’t believe you. Who would notice this initiative, anyway?” M said mildly. “Bond, what were you saying about pliers?”

“I have pliers in my car’s toolkit,” Tanner said. “Got a hammer, too.”

“I’ve got knives perfect for castration,” 004 said. She smiled cheerfully at them. “They’re tried and tested, too.”

“Fine,” Whitmore stopped struggling. “I’ll tell you everything, just let me—”

He snaked his head around to smash his jaw on the front fender of Q’s car. There was an audible crunch, a shout of “Stop him!” from Q, and Whitmore was thrashing at Bond’s feet and foaming at the mouth.

“Well, shit,” Q said. He leaned more heavily on R’s car, pale as a sheet, sweat beading at his brow.

“Indeed,” said M. “So much for interrogation.” Mallory sighed. Tanner was already dialing a clean-up crew.

Q looked at Bond, who was determinedly looking at anything but him. Q took off his glasses and wiped the sweat from his face. He might have been well enough to leave the clinic, but he wasn’t completely recovered yet and he was beginning to feel it. He hoped he could just keep it together for a little while longer.

Q breathed and focused on staying upright. “I need to go to my branch,” he said. “The minions need to be informed, and I need an interim second in command while I work remotely for a few days.”

“You have an hour and then you’re going to be carted off home, whether you like it or not,” M said, in the mild tone of voice that brooked no disagreement. Q nodded wearily.

“That’s all I’ll need,” he said. He took a deep breath and pushed off the car.

001 materialized by his side. “I’ll walk with you,” he said.

“We’ll finish up here, and Moneypenny has spent the past few hours intimidating Interpol into dropping charges against you, Bond.” Mallory looked at R and helped her to her feet. Ever gallant, Mallory was first and foremost a gentleman. “I suppose we’ll have to have a conversation about what happens now, R,” Mallory said.

“Yes, sir,” she said miserably. “I’ll tell you everything and help any way I can.”

Bond looked around at his former comrades-in-arms, and whatever complicated feelings he had about their willingness to dupe and betray him, and then use him for their own purposes consolidated into a solid block of something he’d probably call loneliness. They went about their tasks and paid him as much mind as one of the parked cars.

He turned to walk away.

“James.” He got no more than a few steps before 004 fell into step, a manicured hand on his arm.

“What?” he asked, tones flatter than Kansas.

“If you’re going to creep off into the sunset, at least wait until you aren’t a fugitive anymore,” she said. “You should talk to Q. It’s been long-overdue, don’t you think?”

Bond shook her off. “Too long, overdue, I think.” He handed her the keys to the Challenger. “All of you seem to be handling things just fine without me.”

“There’s only one of us that you should be concerned with,” she said.

“Yeah, and up until ten minutes ago, you all let me think he was dead.”

“Kept you around, didn’t it? Kept you close and from disappearing. You can’t deny you have a habit of walking away to play the Lone Ranger whenever it pleases you. But for Q? You’d stick close, at least for a little while if we kept you busy. Controlling information meant controlling you. Surely you don’t need me to explain the mechanics of espionage to you,” she said, a touch impatiently.

“Don’t put this on me,” Bond warned.

“Leopards and spots, James Bond. I told you—you aren’t a mystery. Except to that clueless cranky boffin who’s still besotted with you for some reason. If it helps, we never told him that we never told you.”

“It doesn’t,” he said, turning away. “Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to disappear now. Since that’s what I’m good at.”

She blew out a gusty, frustrated sigh and muttered something that sounded like “men” and “melodramatic dumb-arses” before calling out: “Run as far as you like James. The world is a smaller place than you think.”

He flipped her off and kept walking.

Scarlett Papava crossed her arms. “He’ll be back,” she said.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Erm, so, my apologies to @Linorien, this outcome was literally planned from the beginning, ought to have known you'd catch me out early. Heh. *looks apologetic*


End file.
